


all that is not gold

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Actual Tailor Lance McClain, Alternate Universe - 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Gold Rush, Cuban Lance (Voltron), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 14:56:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16243997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “The fuck are you looking at, mister?” Keith had snarled up at him. He still remembers Shiro’s reply.“You know,” he’d said, “I’m not rightly sure.”Keith settles in a town called Prosperity, meets a local tailor’s son, and waits for the wanted posters to catch up with him.





	all that is not gold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Wild Fyre Keith zine.

Sometimes, if you say it like a story, it makes it easier. You write yourself out of it; you write yourself through to the other side. You write yourself standing there, whole at the end.

So, stepping out of it all, let’s tell it like this: a boy called Keith Kogane buries his parents in their backyard, in the shade because his mother was prone to sunburn, facing the horizon his father was always looking away from them towards. After his mother left for the sanitorium, scarlet with fever, his father’s gaze had gone glassy, gone through him, written Keith into a kind of shadow boy. All of his mother’s things had been burnt, to absolve her from the risk of contagion, and she had never said where she came from. Keith’s father had told Keith he’d found her wandering the roadside one morning, dust thick on her bare feet, all her belongings tied up in a shawl on her back.

So let’s say blood always outs. Let’s say a runaway birthed a runaway, and after she crossed over that horizon one last time, what else had Keith been raised to do but follow?

 

*

 

Keith wakes to a world on fire. Ochre floods the skyline, the light billowing and cancerous, tinged with leftover night like smoke. The sunrise torches and bleaches the dawn sky to the colour of bone. Keith rides through it all, hanging half-dead off the back of a wagon, too tired to act suspicious. Not that it matters this far out - word’s caught up, but there’s no description out on him as of yet - and he’d hidden under the bales in a hay cart, half-smothered by the itch and his own fear-sweat for the first precarious miles out of Opportunity.

 _You’re dead on your feet,_ Shiro used to say, rolling his eyes as Keith leaned forward, blurry sight scanning the river, hand sinking into the silt like fortune swallowing him whole. _No idea when to stop._

Keith tries not to look back. There’s only ashes that way.

 

*

 

The first time Keith sees Lance McClain, it’s three miles out of Prosperity, and he looks like he was cut, skin and all, from the settlement name. Keith, in contrast, looks anything but. A fortnight on the run - only the clothes on your back and a knife at your belt - will do that to you. Keith’s hair, already due for the barber’s before the fire, is something he’s left to grow. His nails are clean by the same measure, but he’d kill for a rinse of hot water, and it shows: the rind of the dirt on his sweat-tacky flesh almost glistens in the morning sun.

The first thing he notices is how for a church-going group, they sure seem to be laughing awfully much. Second thing is that there’s a lot of them: two siblings at the reins, all silver spectacles and sunburn on pale Irish skin, and then an animated Hispanic family packed into the back. The third thing is how fine they’re dressed, like there’s some kind of pride in it. He’ll learn later that the McClains are tailors by trade, and it shows: something about their Sunday best makes Keith think of how isn’t vanity supposed to be a sin or something? He watches the closest to his own age, a young man sat at the back of the wagon - head thrown back like he’s basking in the sun or some shit - and Keith wonders how long it takes him to get the dust out of all that blue fabric. He probably doesn’t care. Laundry’s not his problem, if that’s his wife hanging off his arm. The glint of her earrings catches the light, and Keith frowns at her, trying to tell if she’s wearing rouge. Women are rare enough out in California, Keith knows that, even as it doesn’t get to him the way it seemed to get to half the guys back in Opportunity. So, he’s got a girl, and he’s wearing a colour Keith has barely seen on a man before. They must be rich; he must be armed. The woman turns and blinks at him, slow, cat-like blinks, and then raises her eyebrows, at which point he realises the wagon’s slowed.

She’s wearing rouge. Keith’s sure of it.

“You new to town?” the man at the reins asks.

“Just passing through,” Keith says, and tries not to let his eyes catch on the scar on the guy’s face. He used to hate it when Shiro got stared at over that. He glances back to the young man in blue, the glint of metal sparking out of the corner of his eye. He’s deliberately pulled his jacket back, and there’s a gun polished to high heaven in his holster. Keith bites down on the urge to roll his eyes.

“You a Forty-Niner then?”

“If there’s something to find out of it,” Keith replies.

 

*

 

Keith’s new plot in Prosperity is about half what he had back in Opportunity, and that’s counting before he’d thrown in his lot with Shiro and they’d merged their claims. He gets it by the good fortune of his predecessor having skipped town a few days before Keith’s arrival. He doesn’t inherit the liquor bill that was left, but he does snag the abandoned tools out of the overseer’s grime-spotted hands. Keith turns them over, testing, the handles of them worn and skin-warm from the holding. Keith’s old tools, or what was left of them, were lying out for scavengers somewhere in the remnants of his old tent, the tarpaulin of it intended as a strange kind of shroud.

“I’ll take them,” he says, and coughs up a percentage to his claim as payment.

In books, having nothing to speak of but the shirt on your back is intended as some kind of metaphor. It’s not exactly literal here either, but it’s close enough that it hits bone. Keith had spare trousers in his saddle-bag, his earnings, a knife, and precious little else. His second shirt had been in the tent.

It takes him a week to step by the tailor’s, even though his shirt is worn near through, with a torn cuff too. He hands over enough gold dust at the end of that first week. The brilliantine shiver of it is dulled in the dark of his cupped hand and plucked out to pay off the rent of the tools and the plot. He gets a quick, staccato tumble of coins back into his palm, like turning a tap on and off again right quick.

“You know,” the grocer says meaningfully, eyeing Keith over the counter as Keith pays off his bread, “The McClains are just down the road, and they do take payment in installments. It’s important to look, ah, proper, else establishments will be getting the wrong idea,” and Keith gives in, a pauper in a town named Prosperity, and goes to the tailor’s door.

“Good morning,” McClain says, the shop voice sliding out of him, the drizzle of it practised, until he raises his eyes and sees Keith standing there. He takes in Keith much the same way he had in the carriage - something unsure and just below judgement simmering in his face, ready to boil over at any small gesture Keith might make.

“I heard you sell shirts.” Keith figures it’s better to get this whole business over with fast. Less risk of getting swept out like the day’s dust that way. The thing with people like McClain is that they’re of this place as much as Keith, for all their nice manners, and that means they’re never fool enough to turn away ready money. Keith tests the weight of the coins in his pocket and goes, “Got told you took installments.”

“Yes,” McClain says, voice slow, eyebrows still raised halfway to heaven, “For people we know.”

Of course.

“That sounds right Christian of you, Mr. McClain,” Keith drawls. Lance winces, almost imperceptibly. Good. He got that then, what Keith was really saying: how taking care of your own and only your own isn’t any kind of real charity. “Was that your mother’s idea?”

McClain’s expression changes immediately. It’s a taunt and they both know it, the oldest one in the book, and Keith isn’t above using it to get under some prissy little tailor boy’s best skin. Keith hasn’t spent as long as he has working in the dirt to not know sore spots for men like Lance McClain, with their soft clean hands, how to spit them out in their faces like pins bristling under his tongue.

“My mother’s idea is not to be in the habit of turning away customers,” McClain replies, mouth tight. “Shame for you how she’s not here.”  

He’s not stupid enough to turn his back on Keith, but he does lean back against his over-polished counter, arms folded, eyes narrowed - like they’re playing cards, though it’s the middle of the day and they’ve never once played against each other, Keith keeping to habit and his own corner of the local saloon whilst McClain plays like someone in a hurry to dig their own grave.  

Keith’s not stupid enough to turn his back either. With his jacket off how it is, Keith can see McClain’s pistol snug in his gun belt. Keith’s seen him down at the saloon or out smiling on the streets of Prosperity - showing off to the local petticoat brigade, using all the tricks you can when you’ve no intent of shooting the pistol outright. And he might be a fair shot, for all Keith knows.  

“Does she know about how much you’re owing the saloon?” Keith counters, taking a bet on how McClain seems hooked to the card tables. He winces. Keith’s struck the right spot, then.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Matters if I can get it you back,” Keith says. McClain doesn’t win because he doesn’t cheat - out of some kind of misplaced honour or honesty or what, Keith doesn’t know. But Keith knows he can scrape half the pockets in there till they come up dry and keep going.

McClain snorts.

“If you can get it back, I’d owe you a lot more than a shirt.”

“I’ll keep you to that,” Keith says, and holds out his hand.

 

*

 

Keith chased gold in the absence of a dream. He was pragmatic enough to know that gold, even as it slipped through the sifting water and the sieve, was the way armour was built. And to Keith, armour was everything.

He met Shiro at his first site. He’d followed a lousy tip, and had ended up in a godforsaken pocket of Helltown, California, sequestered in a tiny slip of a plot with fifty others. Shiro had the neighbouring strip, twice the size of Keith’s, though Keith couldn’t figure out how the fuck he’d gotten it, sandwiched as they were between a riot of mean-eyed white drifters. One of them had tripped Keith, so Keith had decked him. The overseer had come by before Keith’s head could be held fully under the river. Shiro had already fished him out from under the hold of the first guy.

Keith, seething, shook the water out of his eyes, feeling something satisfied and feral in the movement, spattering Shiro’s shirt and his with droplets. Shiro, who was still here, standing beside Keith with no apparent reason to it, eyeing the other miners grumbling back to their posts.

“The fuck are you looking at, mister?” Keith had snarled up at him. He still remembers Shiro’s reply.

“You know,” he’d said, “I’m not rightly sure.”

 

*

 

Keith marches back into the McClain’s shop the next morning, pushes through the gaggle of petticoats and curiosity, and empties the whole pouch he’d gotten out of the saloon crowd onto the counter. The coins clatter all over the wood, spilling on and over themselves in a cascade of silver, plinking against the glass display case just below. Some of them even hit the floor and spin there for a while, the noise of them ringing through the sudden silence, sharp as seeing a new sunrise hungover.

He gets one shirt right then, and when McClain counts up the money, hands moving quicksilver over the coin, he admits there’s enough for a whole new outfit on top of that.

There’s gold rising out of the ground here, but it’s the look on McClain’s face that’s priceless.

 

*

 

When Shiro suggested they team up, Keith had laughed in his face.

“Think about it,” Shiro said, not laughing at all.

“Don’t you go feeling sorry for me,” Keith told him, conscious of his torn jacket, mournful excuse for a sleeping tent, how the hunger must be carving its way into his face. “I’m just fine as I am.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me neither, then,” Shiro replied. It took Keith a second to catch up, watching Shiro gesture at the absence below his right shoulder.

“Why would I even?” Keith retorted, and meant it. Keith had only half of Shiro’s lot, after all; for all Shiro was missing an arm, nobody said a word to Shiro over the screaming that woke near the whole stretch of their stream every other night. Shiro was liked in the local town, dangerously close to well-liked even; a concept that seemed to Keith, a stranger in a strange land, even more foreign territory.

And Keith is an orphan. And this is America: brotherhood is a lie. Keith knows this. The huddled masses yearn to breathe free from way down low, trod on by the boots of those standing above by luck or birth, their skin something they turn into a flag of virtue.

Keith is a boy made of dust, tar and his dead parents’ dreams; Keith is a boy who should know better.

He takes Shiro’s hand anyway.

 

*

 

It goes like this: Shiro doesn’t appear, and Keith keeps waiting on him. He’s coming to Prosperity. They’d agreed on it, and so there’s only two ways this ends: either Shiro ends up here, or he doesn’t, and either way, Keith’s no quitter. So he stays in the town and he gets fitted for a suit he rightly doesn’t need and he spends - which always means a debt to be called in down the line - more time with Lance McClain than common sense can justify.

 

It goes like this: nobody looks at him twice, but it doesn’t stop Keith looking over his shoulder. Waiting means sitting still. Sitting still is an easy way to get caught up to, to end up swinging in the clutch of a noose.

It goes like this: Keith isn’t sure when he started calling Lance _Lance_ , only it’s something that’s started in his head and then grown outside of it, the single syllable of it hanging on his tongue like he’s panting after something.

Something, he says, like he doesn’t know what. Something - some things - are easier not to know, not out loud, not even in the silent rooms of your own mind.

 

*

 

They stay in Opportunity - him and Shiro, Shiro and him. Trusting in the name, It’s there they strike it lucky and sign their way into some kind of doom, both at once. Fate’s like that.

The first night after they find the gold - not just gold but the gold, the weight of it in the hand a strain on the arm - Shiro and Keith sit up all night, passing a bottle back and forth, debating what to do. They are made of this world by now - cut out from the skin of the earth - and it makes them suspicious. And with good reason. They know Lotor - the current way of getting gold out of the area and turning it into ready coin, his hold over the place some kind of brand - and they know he’s crooked as the Devil himself. There’s no way they’ll get the worth of what they’ve found from him.

They pass it back and forth - the nugget of it glistening in the candlelight - skin-warm, blood-warm, like some kind of egg.

“We don’t tell him,” Keith says. Shiro nods. “He can’t find out. We’ll pack up and move on, and trade it somewhere else.”

It’s a good plan. If only good things didn’t sour so quick out in the heat.

 

*

 

"Lance," Keith says. In the half-light, slipping in and silvering them through the store window, their silhouettes are thrown up against the floorboards. "Lance, I really ought to tell you something."

  
Lance raises his eyebrows, his eyelashes glittered metallic, the shine of his cuffs when he folds his arms against his chest and goes, "Go on, then. Tell me something."  
  
Here’s something: Keith has been searching for gold so long that sometimes in his dreams he sees it, slip-sliding through his fingers in the water as he sifts for his fortune and a future - aren't they the same thing, after all?

  
"I'm in -" Keith stops, swallows. "I'm in an awful lot of trouble."

Here’s something else: these days, he thinks, looking at Lance in the fall of a full moon, he's dreaming in silver more often than he isn't.

  
"Yeah, and what about it?" Lance replies which is not what Keith was expecting him to say. Lance pauses, peering at Keith's face."What, did you think I couldn't tell or something?"

"I’ve never said."

"I’m not stupid," Lance shrugs. “So, what did you do?”

"I didn't do nothing," Keith snaps. Lance rolls his eyes.

"Alright, sure," Lance says, "What did they say you did, then? Did you kill someone?"

"What? No! What makes you -"

"You sit around cleaning that knife a lot."

_"It's my only knife."_

"It's fine if you did." Lance’s eyes are absurdly steady, "You'll have your reasons."

"I didn't kill anyone," Keith replies through gritted teeth. "They say I stole some horses."

"A lot of them?"

"Four."

Lance whistles, low under his breath.

"What did you need four horses for?"

"Nothing! I didn't!"

  
"Okay, fine," Lance echoes, "Then you didn't."

"Don't you believe me?"

"Does it matter?" Lance replies. "I want to. It's not like I'm scared of you."

Keith steps forward. Lance steps back. Keith reaches up, cards through Lance's hair, watches Lance lean his head heavy against the cradle of Keith's palm and close his eyes, those stupid eyes that are trusting like a deer's. The yearning in his face opens the same old hollow in Keith's stomach it always does.

"Yes," Keith says in the breath of space between them, "Yes, you are. Just not over that," and kisses him.

 

*

 

They’d been heading back into Opportunity, Keith at Shiro’s side and a day picking up travel supplies behind them, when they’d seen the fire licking up the skyline. Seen the posters slapped onto the nearest outhouses. _Wanted._ Of course. _Horse theft._ Of course. Right out of Lotor’s stables like taking bread out of his mouth. Of course. It’s the kind of story that’s easy, that slides down your throat quick, the kind of story it’s easy to buy.

Their tent, fired up by their neighbours, had been beyond salvageable - you could tell that from a distance. The burning left a thick and oily taste in Keith’s mouth, rolling around in there like the churn of his stomach. They didn’t dare go closer in, knowing how riots are built from bodies - how they’d make good fuel. They’d just booked it. Every hanging tree they passed loomed up out of the darkness, heavy-fruited and rotting in the sun, silhouette a prediction of what could be waiting for them if they ever dared stop.

It remained unbeaten in Keith’s memory as the longest night of his life. And then they were left alone in the dawn, turned phantom-pale with fright: the two of them, their saddlebags, and a secret fortune weighing on their backs. Strangers in a strange land.

They’d split up, a single destination in mind, Shiro taking the gold. Keith stood and watched Shiro leaving for a long while before turning the opposite way, striking out towards the silent faces of the mountains, stone-faced to match. Hollow inside. A repository of secrets.   

 

*

 

Shiro makes it into town a fortnight after Keith kisses Lance and Lance does more than let him. Keith’s not sure how he finds him - them - only that he must’ve followed them - out to the abandoned mines, drenched in the shade of the same mountains. Somewhere nobody else ought to have any reason to go.   

Drunk off the weight of Lance's mouth, it takes Keith longer than it ought for him to hear approaching footsteps and translate them into some kind of threat. He throws himself off of Lance, reaching for his knife, but his hand closes around only dirt. Dust settles under the clutch of his fingernails, and Lance reaches up after him, raised up on his elbows, mouth a soft confused shape.

Keith doesn't have the time to pick words that make sense out of his head, but in the end, he doesn't have to. He sees it in Lance’s eyes when he hears them too. Lance reaches for his gun belt, strewn across to the side, slower than he might've been with it in its proper place. His hand curls around it just as the footsteps catch up to them. The swing of a lantern back and forth like a single burning eye bobbing underwater.

It's too dark to see a shadow, but the voice that calls out is as recognisable as a silhouette. The sound of Shiro calling his name is both familiar and made strange by stress of the last two months on Keith's memory, distorted like water damage.

"Keith?"  
  
Without looking away, Keith reaches out and grabs Lance's wrist, stilling him as he gets ready to aim. He knows better by now than to assume Lance might miss the shot, than to think there's nothing beneath all the show. If Lance hadn't also been distracted, Shiro might already be dead, metal rattling around in his chest. So Keith stops Lance, does it even as he feels the tension go through Lance like a puppet hoisted by all its strings at once.

(The only difference, after all, between a puppet and a hanged man is how they were cut out of their mothers - bark or blood. Both are entertainment.)

This all seems very slow, though it's a matter of seconds, time stretched out by the feel of Lance's skin and then the surprise.

"Shiro," Keith says, scrambling to his feet, kicking dust asunder over the blanket, heedless of the wreck of his clothes and hair. He can hear his own voice, how it's hopeful like Christmas morning. " _Shiro._ "

"Shiro?" Lance echoes, though it's suspicious and he doesn't let go of his death grip on his gun. "As in, wait - this is Shiro?"  
  
Keith ignores him in favour of flinging himself bodily towards where Shiro is, making Shiro stumble backwards, sending the lantern he's carrying careering wildly in his hold. It illuminates him piecemeal - an eye, the scar, the new close crop of hair - odd, like an invalid might wear. Has Shiro been ill?

“Have you been ill?” Keith demands, leaning back to take in what he can, snatching the lantern from Shiro to hoist it over their faces.

“Caught a fever on my way through,” Shiro replies. That’ll explain it. They shave your hair to take down your temperature, something Keith had always wondered about - whether it had happened to his own mother, even as he grew older and became sure it must have. “Holed up somewhere a while. It’s fine.”

It’s not fine. Keith drops it for now.

“Thanks for waiting,” Shiro says, sounding like he means it, like he didn’t expect Keith to stay put which is - laughable, really.

And they’ll be going now. That’s always been it. That’s always been the plan.

“Don’t mention it,” Keith says, swallowing hard, heart heavy in his throat - Shiro right there, and Lance at his back, waiting, the silence telling of something unsaid. “Any time.”

 

*

 

“Come with us,” Keith tells him - tells, because he doesn’t want to admit he’s asking. Lance looks up at him, face brimming with some kind of hope, the rise of it spilling over and onto the floor.

“I can’t,” Lance says. He means _I shouldn’t._

Keith has seen the way Lance’s eyes stay and hold, hooked on the horizon; clinging, hinged. Some kind of longing reaching up through him until he sees he’s being watched, until he swallows it back down.

Keith knows what it’s like, to live like that. There is more of them in each other than he had ever known.

“Yes, you can,” Keith replies. _Yes, you should._

 

*

 

Keith and Shiro set out for San Francisco the next morning, baked alive under a gold-limned sky. Keith can feel Lance watching them from where he’s stood, right on the edge of Prosperity, hovering on the lip of the boundary like someone ready to take a very great leap. Poised - which is, of course, another word for waiting.

“He’s not coming, then?” Shiro sounds all sympathy. Keith braves a look behind him, the shirt Lance had cut out for him soft against his back.

Lance catches Keith staring, manages a wink and a smile that only shivers at the corners a little.

“He is,” Keith corrects Shiro, hoping the saying of it out loud won’t break the newly-formed dream of it. “But he’s not like us. He has his people here. He can’t just cut and run out on them overnight.”

There’s only two ways this ends. Either Lance catches up to them in a few days’ time - littering excuses and goodbyes on the path behind him - or he doesn’t. Catching up to, in this instant, is not the same thing as being caught. Or maybe it is.

Keith isn’t sure. He’s waiting to find out.

The future is a thing unfolding before him, and Keith tries his best not to look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Some historical notes:
> 
> Scarlet fever, which is what Keith's mother died of, was a highly common cause of death in the 20th century. The belongings of people who had become infected were burnt, whether they survived the illness or not, to prevent further contagion. 
> 
> The [California Gold Rush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush%5D) began on January 24th, 1948. Approximately 300,000 people emigrated into California from the rest of the United States, looking to make their fortunes. California became a state in 1850, partially due to the sudden rise in the population. This fic is set between 1851-2, shortly after California becomes a state.
> 
> Forty-Niner is a nickname for a miner chasing the Gold Rush, for the peak year of cross-country, Gold-Rush-related immigration.
> 
> Crime rose rapidly with an increasingly transient state population, so Lance carrying a firearm would be actively encouraged, especially - if, as Keith believes - Lance has a wife to 'protect'. Horse theft was a serious crime, and the penalty could be hanging, so if discovered Keith could be killed.
> 
> By 1852, San Francisco has transformed into a boomtown with a population of roughly 36,000 - compared to just 200 six years beforehand.
> 
> Although a huge amount of wealth was uncovered from the Gold Rush, most of it remained in the hands of a few people. The vast majority were not significantly wealthier post-Gold Rush than they had been beforehand.
> 
>  The title is from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: "all that glisters is not gold." 
> 
>  


End file.
